The Psychology of your 20s - 191. My favourite psychology studies of ALL TIME

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

We have found some pretty amazing ways to observe human behaviour and from it, discovered some especially interesting things about how we operate, who we are at our core, our irrational beliefs and so much more. In today's episode, we break down five of my favourite psychology studies of all time from jam, to mental escapism and binge watching TV, how many friends we actually need, the healing power of nature and the origins of imposter syndrome. Listen now!  Study One: The Stanford Jam Experiment https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf Study Two: In your 20s it's quantity, in your 30s its quality  https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-10764-001  Study Three: Loneliness, Escapism, and Identification With Media Characters  https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.785970/full  Study Four: The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women https://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women.pdf  Study Five: Effects of Coastal Environment on Well-being  https://www.walshmedicalmedia.com/open-access/effects-of-the-coastal-environment-on-wellbeing-jczm-1000421.pdf    Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast  Business enquiries: [e-mail]    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to this show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. Today I have something a little bit different for you. I'm really excited about this because it is not what we typically do on the show. Most weeks we pick two topics that we encounter in our 20s

and we break down the psychology behind them. Obviously, you guys know this, but this week I want to do the reverse. I want to start with the psychology and the research and the studies and show how that applies to our lives. So, yeah, I thought it would be a little bit fun. In all honesty, I have been experiencing a bit of a creative block recently, and I thought kind of the best way to counteract that is to just get back to the core of why I love this podcast and this job, which is because of the science and how fascinating human behavior and psychology is and how as humans we are really, really, you know, great and really creative at observing this and measuring this and,

you know, studying ourselves. Also, you know, sometimes there isn't enough space in an episode or a season or it's like kind of never the right time to bring up a study that I love and want to share. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to talk about my five favorite psychology papers, psychology studies of all time and what they can tell us about our 20s. Now, these five studies that I have for you today, they are not going to be like your classic psychology studies that people tend to think of. I think we all have some idea of, you know, Pavlov's dogs and the Stanford Prison Experiment and the bystander effect. or the Bobo Doll study, I think that those are part of our, like, regular psychobabble and, like, collective memory.

But I want to go a little bit deeper, kind of pass the classics into not the everyday, but into the stuff that you would typically say, like published in a journal in this day and age. The studies that don't necessarily make headlines, even if they deserve to. I have a study on jam. I have a study on friendship,

one on mental escapism and binge watching television shows. I've got one on gender and imposter syndrome. And as a finale, my favorite study on something totally out of left field, really, which is the ocean and the ancient Greek concept of Thalassotherapy. Okay, reading that through, I'm like, that's quite a mix back. But hopefully there is like something for everybody. There's something for you to learn. I'm so pumped to get into it.

it and hopefully just give you some fun new party facts, some fun new psychology trivia. So let's get into it. So I know I promised some lesser known studies, but I'm going to start off with the most well-known one that I kind of have for you. It is known as the Stanford Jam Experiment. If you are a long-time listener of the show, I have talked about this before, but never in its entirety. You would kind of think of all the ways that we can study human psychology that a condiment we put on toast isn't going to be one of them. But I think psychologists and researchers,

one thing that they do have is like a very creative knack for finding really like different ways to observe decision making and human behavior and consumer choices using things that seem quite ubiquitous. So the Stanford jam experiment, it is a classic study and it was conducted at Stanford University by Sheena Yeager and Mark Lepper in 1995, so 30 years ago. And this study is essentially what created the concept of the paradox of choice. So in this experiment, they wanted to observe shoppers, grocery store shoppers at an upstow supermarket. And how they did that was they presented them with a tasting booth where they could sample different flavors of jam. You know, we've all seen that at like Costco or the grocery store, some new product that they have, you get to have a free sample.

And so what they did was they set up two kind of stalls, one on day one and one. Also one on the first weekend. And then the next weekend, they came back. So in the first weekend, which is the first condition, the researchers offered. a display with a limited selection of six different jams, you know, your strawberry, your marmalade, your classics. In the second condition, the weekend after, they offered a much larger selection of 24 jams.

What they wanted to see was how likely people were to purchase a jam in each of these conditions. So basically they were observing, investigating how the number of choices we are presented affects our ability to make decisions and to be satisfied with our choices. I think from a surface level, like intuitively, you would think that when people had more jam, they were more likely to make a purchase. They were more likely to buy a jam because there was a greater chance that one of the jars, one of the flavors matched their preferences.

But actually, although people were more attracted to the store when they were a larger number of jams. People asked for more tasters. Fewer people actually made a purchase compared to when there was a smaller assortment of only six jams. The second part of these findings was that those people who had more options on the first weekend were actually a lot less satisfied with their choice and they were more likely to regret it. So when they went and talked to them afterwards and they said, oh, was there another gem that you would have wanted? How happy are you with your choice? How excited are you with your new jam? They'd be like, oh yeah, pretty good. I don't know though. There seems to be like, maybe I should have gotten this other one. What if the strawberry was going to be better than the raspberry?

Whereas with the people who had purchased when there were only six gems, they didn't seem to have that same level of back and forth with themselves. So this experiment really highlighted the concept of choice overload, where when we have too many options, this can actually lead to decision paralysis, decrease satisfaction, and even avoidance of making a decision altogether because we have too much to consider. More options might seem like more freedom, but it actually feels quite restrictive because unconsciously I think we feel as if we are more likely to make the wrong choice given we have more options and therefore we don't make one at all. So this has so much application to our 20s, you wouldn't believe it. I think dating apps are the first example I like

to think of because they are so commonplace in this day and age. Most of us have encountered dating apps in some form. And the thing about them is that they give us so much options and choices. We have like endless matches and our fingertips. If the first person you see on those apps isn't the one, the next person might be. And if they're not, you have another person and another person and another shot after that. But that can actually be really overwhelming because everybody we encounter begins to lose their appeal. The whole process becomes very paralyzing because we have choice overload. We have too many people to consider. We get too paralyzed by the possibility of, wait, was that person the one?

But what about this person or the next person or the next person? And so we don't end up going on dates or meeting in person or really engaging with any of our candidates because it's hard to choose between them. It's hard to feel satisfied with any one person and want to pursue it further. Another important application is our career choices. I think this is a common experience. There are so many lives. that we want to live, especially in our 20s when like the world feels very open to us.

There are so many future versions of ourselves we want to realize that it can feel, I think, quite impossible to choose just one and feel satisfied for that. Do we go the traditional route? Do we take a gap here? Do we do our masters? Do we want to be more entrepreneurial? Do we want to start our own business? Work for ourselves.

work for a company that has security or do something totally out of the ordinary, you know, become an artist or a zookeeper, whatever. I think the example is that our 20s are brimming with opportunity and that is such a blessing, but the more decisions we make when it comes to our careers, the more doors, I think, seem to close. So it makes it quite stressful and confronting. And intuitively, we don't want to make a decision or make a decision. choice and feel like we're limiting ourselves. And that is, you know, a real life example of this

jam experiment. So my next study is about another core aspect of our 20s. It's about friendship and how many friends we need to actually feel fulfilled, feel satisfied and to boost our well-being. So in 2015, a 30-year longitudinal study out of the University of Rochester was published in the Journal of Psychology and Ageing. 30 years. That's how long it had taken. And it determined that in our 20s, it is actually the quantity of friends that we have. Whilst in our 30s, it's the quality that seems to matter when it comes to our psychological well-being. Essentially, what this study kind of suggested or concluded is that in our 20s, we should actually be focused on building a large, expansive network, even if not everybody, is hand-selected and our best friend, whereas in our 30s, it's about pruning those relationships, being comfortable

with some of them fading, and really seeking out quality friendship over quantity. So, how did they conclude this? This research, like I said, published in 2015, so only 10 years ago, but it began in the 1970s. So the researcher, Paul Dubastain, he is a psychiatry professor at the University of Rochester, and he followed 100 students who were once students at the university, so they were one students, not anymore. He followed 100 X students alumni from when they were students through their 20s, their 30s, and their 40s. Now, at multiple points in their 20s and 30s, they were asked to record their daily interactions with others and to score them on intimacy and unpleasantness. So they weren't doing this like all the time.

He would kind of like pop back up to them for just a small period and say, hey, I just need you to take some notes on this for a couple days or for a week. Decades later, he got back in touch with them and he asked them some questions relating to. their psychological well-being, their sense of loneliness, and quality of friendship. And what they found was that having too many friends at 30 was actually a bit of a problem because it could prevent you from developing meaningful relationships. But on the flip side, just meeting more people in your 20s, regardless of the depth of your interactions and your relationships, that kind of has its own merits.

So what does this study tell us about friendship in our 20s? I think it tells us two things. The first thing is that you don't need to be too worried about meeting your best friend at this age if you're in your 20s. You don't need to be concerned by the fact that you haven't found your people yet because you have time and it seems that this decade is about prioritizing just getting out there, right? Just having those situational friendships, those fleeting moments, even if they don't last, our 30s are the decade for quality friendship and for kind of

fine-tuning and deepening those pre-existing relationships. I will say that a small problem with this research was that it was mainly conducted before the invention of social media. Things have changed a lot now. So it would be really fascinating to see how these results may shift as we have more interactions online and you know face-to-face interactions aren't always the norm for catching up and communicating and chatting with our friends i think one way you could adapt this study is to kind of like download software onto participants phones that monitors who they talk to on social media whether

they speak to the same five people or like a broad community and then see how that relates to well-being in our 20s or 30s or whether it's the quantity of interest. interactions like dictated by social media versus the quality, which we would just kind of assume come from in-person interactions that count. I don't know. Just an interesting way of like adapting this to a modern context because I think it could really tell us a lot more if you want to read about the study, any of the studies, I really would recommend the article in the description.

So our third study is entirely different. We are switching gears away from our careers and friendship and relationship. to our TVs, to our laptops. We're going to talk about binge watching. Mental escapism, loneliness, how those three things are correlated or have a relationship to each other. I was having this conversation with my friends the other day

that the way TV shows are released these days makes them so much easier to binge watch and consume rapidly. I don't know, if you're in your 20s, like in your mid-late 20s, you will remember when like gossip girl and glee would come out and you would have to like wait each week for the next episode and then they would like take a two week break like randomly over Christmas or in the summertime and you would have to watch like Simpsons reruns or whatever it was

nowadays like the whole thing comes out all at once and companies like Netflix and Hulu and Apple Amazon Prime they're really focused on like these mini series that we can consume really quickly and then immediately go looking for something else. I'm going to admit I'm into it. I just finished baby reindeer on Netflix. I'm like captivated. I got through it in three days. And it's kind of one of those behaviors that you just fall into.

I think that it's a lot more common though amongst people who are seeking a kind of mental escapism from their daily lives. Whether that's because their jobs aren't going well, they're lonely, something else is going on, their relationship is breaking down, we turn to binge watching as a form of mental escapism. So the study I want to talk about that discovered this correlation was published in 2021, and it's titled Loneliness, Escapism and Identification with Media Characters, an Exploration of the Psychological Factors underlying binge watching tendency. Okay, a bit of a mouthful. So in this study, they had a sample of 490 individuals.

mainly from the UK and the United States. And they were asked about their typical media usage and how many hours they spent watching TV along with which streaming services they were using. That could include any of them, you know, like we said, Amazon, Netflix, Stan, they just wanted to know. They were then measured for loneliness using the UCLA loneliness scale

and a binge watching tendency test, which is a real thing we can measure how likely you are to binge watch a TV show. It asks questions like, I always need to watch more episodes to feel satisfied. Do you strongly agree or strongly disagree? I keep watching even when I have other things I need to do. I avoid sleep to keep watching my TV series.

Those are kind of the questions that operationalize this concept of binge watching. So when the researchers looked at the results, what they found was that higher feelings of loneliness are associated with higher levels of problematic binge watching behaviors and excessive TV consumption. This was interpreted as a form of mental escapism, wanting a mental break from your daily life by seeking solace in something that is entirely different. And the reason why this kind of behavior would be so common amongst those who are looking for a mental escape is because binge watching is so low effort and undemanding,

but it provides a really engaging distraction even when our mental energy reserves are super depleted and we're super drained. I actually think that binge watching is an activity that it's easier to continue than to quit, right? Like when you're approaching the end of an episode, the next one is immediately going to play, meaning that it's more demanding for you to stop and turn the TV off than it is to just continue the show. I also think that when we continually watch the same kind of TV series that features the same characters,

the same plots, the same locations, it's less cognitively demanding than switching to other activities, which is why when we're going through, I think, tough, lonely, draining periods of burnout, whatever it is, we are more likely to turn to, you know, television. or miniseries or Netflix for comfort. Media companies leverage this. They know we have a lot going on and they know that if they provide a comfortable place for our brains to relax,

we'll keep coming back, even if it's at the expense of other things we want to do with our days, with our lives. What can we kind of take from this? Well, I think it's about being aware of the why. Why can't we stop? Why do we have to watch the whole thing in one night? Why does so many of us find it easier to kind of switch off in this way and stay that way for hours than to do something more active in our lives?

I don't think that it's always necessarily a bad thing, but when it does become a form of mental escapism, whereby it's like you're kind of sitting into a whole new reality, you're completely switching off from your life, you're trying not to engage with what's actually going on in your every day. that can be quite problematic. I really love this study so much because I think it makes a lot of sense, right? We find so much comfort in TV shows in the media, in binge watching something repetitive or something that we know or something that has just come out and it's exciting and novel.

But sometimes we don't really think about the why behind our excessive consumption behaviours. So it's a fascinating one. Again, it will be in the description. So far, we've covered my top three. We have two left. And we're going to get to them after this short break. So stay with us.

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Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Maricopa County as Laura O'Brien. Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to a love-trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think we've all heard about the idea of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome refers to a psychological pattern where individuals, like you and I, doubt our accomplishments.

And we have a persistent fear of being exposed. as a fraud, as a liar, despite the evidence of our competence and of our success in the fact that we are intelligent people. We feel really undeserving. We feel like our successes and achievements all come down to luck or external factors rather than our own abilities and therefore we're constantly in a state of fear that people are going to figure out that we really don't know what we're doing. This is such a common feeling and it's also such a well-known term that I don't think we actually know where it comes from. So this brings me to study number four, the imposter phenomenon in high achieving women, dynamics and therapeutic intervention. That is the title of this article of this study that was conducted at Georgia State University once again back in the 70s in 1978.

So this research and analysis, it focused on 150 highly successful women, women who had earned PhDs, who were respected doctors, professors, recognized for the academic success. They were at the top of their field. And they were all linked not just by their achievements, but this paralyzing sense that they didn't deserve any of it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So for example, in this study, these two researchers, Dr. Pauline Clance, Dr. Susan Immis, they spoke to these women, these 150 women. And some of the statements and self-reports that they collected during the study included these students who were like absolutely convinced that there had been some like administrative error in admitting them to like a really prestigious college. There were heaps of graduate students who had really high exam scores and they would say to them full honestly, like they believe this to their core that something must have happened. Their scores were wrong. Their papers had been misgraded.

There was faulty judgment by the professors. There were also professors and doctors who would say some mistake was made in my selection process that gave me my tenure. or obviously I'm in this position because my abilities have been overestimated. There was another woman with two master's degrees, a PhD, numerous publications, who was a lecturer, and she basically said, I'm unqualified to teach. This was a mistake. This is just luck.

Somebody is obviously screwed up and when they find out I'm in big trouble. this seemed so irrational and bizarre to these researchers because it just seemed that all of the evidence was there these women should be totally secure in their accomplishments and where they were in their lives but within the context of the 1970s they kind of hypothesized that the reason women were experiencing this like syndrome more than men was because of how they were socialized at the time to be humble, to be meek, to not be intelligent, to not take credit for their successes, whereas men were allowed to be the heroes. They were allowed to be confident, if not arrogant, and celebrate themselves publicly for their

successes and their achievements. They also kind of speculated that because at the time women weren't super common in these high-profile exceptional academic and professional environments, they didn't really have a narrative for their success because it seemed so unexpeachment. expected compared to those around them. So the most natural conclusion was that it must be a fluke. The other thing they also sought an explanation in was family dynamics and the childhood that these women had. And this is a component of imposter syndrome I think people don't typically know about how imposter syndrome really does have its roots in our infancy, in our childhood, in our

adolescence. What they concluded was that these quote unquote impostors, they typically fell into one of two groups. They fell into a group of high achievers or the designated kind of intelligent member of the family or they were the sensitive member of the family, not particularly special, not really made to shine. So the intelligent child constantly worked to meet their family prophecy that they were brilliant. She was told numerous examples of how she would always been bright, how she was such a quick learner, how she excelled from an early age. In the family members' eyes, I think she's perfect. They lavish her with praise. But then she encounters things the older she gets that she can't do. And so she begins to doubt her abilities. She no longer

lives up to this like perfection with ease idea that her parents and her family have pushed on her. And if she's not the genius that she was always told she was, she's an intellectual imposter. That was group one of these women who were experiencing imposter syndrome. There were the women who, since young age, you know, were lucky enough to have parents and family who really celebrated them, perhaps too much so to the point where they kind of had a too big to fail mentality. On the other hand, they have this other group of women who were experiencing imposter syndrome who were kind of always second, who were always runner up compared to the bright sibling. They could never really impress their parents. Their achievements and performance and

accolades were never really seen as that special. To like directly quote from the article, these women in one domain really crave validation and keep pushing to prove their intellectual competence kind of in rebellion of what their parents and their family has always said. But on the other hand, they also think that their family must be correct. So this woman secretly doubts her intellect and begins to wonder whether she has actually gained high marks because of her social skills, because she has tricked people, because there's been a mistake. And so the imposter syndrome emerges from a constantly wanting to prove that she is intelligent, that she is worthy, that she is successful, but then having that self-doubt that comes from that inner voice

her parents have instilled in her, that she isn't smart enough, that she doesn't deserve this. I really love this study because it was honestly one of the first ever academic pieces of research that focused on successful women and their psychology and their upbringing. And it was conducted, again, by two really amazing female doctors and female psychologists who went on to create that term through this research, that term imposter syndrome, that is now like a huge part of our collective psychobabble and our language. But when you really look into it further and you actually read their analysis and their suggestions, there are so many more fascinating conclusions than most of us are aware of.

And I think we like to throw around the term imposter syndrome, but there is a lot of depth behind that, a lot of fascinating history, and of course psychology that this study really goes into. So honestly, it is worth reading. The first time I came across it, it genuinely changed so much about how I saw how I saw myself, how I saw my friends, my family, my childhood, my present day insecurities and self-doubts. Again, it will be in the description.

So this brings us to our fifth and final study of the day. And I want to end on something kind of positive and beautiful and joyful. So we're going to talk about a study that really articulates some of the beauty and nice parts about being human. and kind of the fact that we are really connected to nature and all living things around us. So the whole sub-discipline of eco-psychology is really focused on that. And if you've listened to this episode that we did previously on the healing power of nature, you'll know I kind of have a real soft spot for any research, any concepts, any theories

that emphasizes our relationship and the importance of being outdoors and rewilding our minds and our bodies. I also grew up really close to the ocean. It was such like a significant part of my childhood, like going down to burly heads and Corrumban waters in the Gold Coast and the sea is like one of those places that I feel very comfortable in and at peace. And I think it's, you know, tangent here, but it's a really huge blessing to have grown up in a country that has such a huge beach culture and like access to this natural asset. And the thing that I've always found is that being by the ocean,

is one of the easiest ways to reduce my stress levels, to reset, to bring about perspective in my life. My dad used to always say that the ocean is nature's natural healer and it eases all wounds, physical and mental. And this study I'm about to tell you about actually seems to provide some science and some evidence for that. So this study was conducted in Japan and is titled The Effects of Coastal Environmental. on well-being. So they wanted to know whether living by the ocean was better for your health and better, especially for your emotional and psychological health. And they did this by comparing 518 residents from the Hyogo Prefecture, which is where Kobe is, the origin of Kobe Beath.

And they compared people in this area who lived by the sea and people who lived inland and in the major cities. And what they found was this. People by the seaside seemed a whole, lot happier. They reported higher positive psychological effects of the ocean. This was particularly the case for women and elderly residents, but actually in general, there was not a single person who wasn't happier living by the sea. And they wanted to know why this was. Well, I think the argument they made is that the coast is a therapeutic landscape. It brought upon really important and strong feelings of restoration of awe and a peace of mind which it seemed harder for people who lived in big cities to achieve and that all kind of contributed to a greater sense of mental well-being.

Access to the ocean, to the sea, to the coast it also seemed to play part in this sense of like magnitude and the sense that we are small but because of that what we're doing doesn't matter, if that makes sense. So it feels quite existential, but actually it was quite liberating. There's also, to follow that up, another paper that looked into this original study, and it found that there is a more neurological impact of the ocean in our psychology. Staring at the sea, staring at the waves, literally changes our brain wave frequency. It kind of puts us in a mild, meditative state that has a relaxing effect on all of our senses when we allow ourselves to kind of watch the ebb and flow of the swell that has a genuine impact on our brainwave frequency

on our brain activity. This may be a recent study, but it's not a recent concept. There is a Greek idea known as Thalassar therapy, which stems from the Greek word Thalasa meaning C and therapy. basically the ancient Greek believed that the ocean had genuine healing properties and i kind of have to agree it encompassed like this whole range of treatments like philassotherapy was like a genuine kind of like treatment plan you could get from your ancient greek doctor and it included things like um seawater baths marine mud wraps seaweed wraps inhalation of seamis and these treatments were were believed to have various benefits, not just physical. They thought they helped with circulation, with relieving muscle tension, with kind of

detoxifying the body. But on the psychological and mental level, it also helped promote relaxation. And it brought about a level of mental clarity and peace for these individuals that is so valuable even to this day for our emotional state. I got to say, I love this study so much because it really highlights how important nature is for our health, which is something that I think we tend to neglect as cities become more concrete, more industrialized, our life becomes busier, and we are naturally kind of separated from the natural environments that we evolved in. I think it's also a good reminder that if you're feeling a bit

restless, a bit unsettled, a bit unsure about your future, about your current state of affairs, if you're kind of looking for meaning, you're looking for peace, the ocean is a really good. good place to go. It is such a restorative environment. I always say you never regret a swim in the ocean. And I think that's true. I think it's true because when you are like very much immersed in this natural environment, you feel very small but that allows you to feel very free. And it allows you to really slow down from a lot of the industrial, you know, hustle culture, rise and grind mentality and like focus in on the fact that you are human, the fact that everything's going to be okay, the fact that, you know, you have this place for rest and this place for peace where nature doesn't

care about you and isn't that kind of like a beautiful, beautiful thing? So that was the final study that I had for you today. I really hope that you enjoyed this. This was actually so fun for me. I think it's so rare that I get to really break into like specific articles and studies and spend like some serious time on them, let alone getting to do that for five of my favorites. So I really hope that you learned something. I hope that you picked up maybe a new word, a new piece of psychology trivia, a new thing to bring up at work, bring up to your friends, bring up to your family. And as always, if you did enjoy this episode, please feel free to share it with a friend

or give us five stars on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening. it really does help the show grow. And if you enjoy this content, it would be great if it reached new audiences and new people. So make sure you are following along. Make sure you're subscribed. If you have something to contribute based on this discussion, if you have a favorite psychology study that you want me to talk about, if you have anything to say about the ones I've already spoken about,

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